I am going to take up one purpose of the criminal trial other than fact finding with respect to the cases of stolen antiquities, repatriation, and the indictment against the curator of the Getty. These criminal proceedings offer themselves as little more than a Kafkaesque incantation to persuade art collectors and museums worldwide to repatriate suspicious antiquities even if the real heart of the issue is problem with lawless, mafioso Sicily, new technologies, and ineffective law enforcement in the area. In light of the prejudiced Italian authorities prosecuting the case against an American, this purpose of the trial, then, is something like a show trial, indeed a symbolic trial. My outline below contains far too much, so I plan to purge a lot of material as the idea takes shape.

Paper Title (TBD)

Introduction: Two Interrelated Functions of Criminal Trials

As the curator of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, Marion True was an unlikely figure to find herself in the midst of Italian criminal proceedings. She is charged for conspiracy in connection with a Sicilian antiquities smuggling ring whose goal was to loot, excavate, and export the Aphrodite statute out of Italy. Since 1939, the the cultural patrimony laws have prohibited such activity. As the law decrees, all antiquities discovered on Italian soil become the property of the Italian state who holds the items in trust for the Italian people. Nationalism is a crucial motivating factor in the existence and enforcement of such a law. Hence, it is no surprise that the original law was enacted in the heat of the patriotic fire raging during Benito Mussolinni's Fascist rule. This paper argues that the Italian government has, not substituted, but supplemented the purpose of fact finding in criminal trials by transforming True's trial into a symbol of a cultural crusade against looters and buyers. This purpose, then, takes two forms. First, True's trial functions as a message to cultural institutions that the Italian government is shifting the emphasis of anti-smuggling enforcement from the mafioso looters in Sicily to American museum professionals. Second, it also serves to hurry American museums to repatriate the suspicious antiquities in their collections. True's trial represents less a belief in her factual guilt, more the culmination of two social forces: Italy's unsuccessful enforcement efforts at home and a resurging nationalistic fervor to reclaim Italy's cultural patrimony.

The Problem of Looters, or The First 'Purpose' of Shifting the Burden from Italian Criminals to Foreign Museum Professionals

Birth of a Black Market in Morgantina, Sicily

The Other Side of the Trial, or the Consistent Failure in Convicting the Proximate Offenders

A Martyr for Another Country's Cause, or the Second 'Purpose' of Persuading the Buyers to Repatriate Mercilessly

True's Trial as a Powerful Symbol for Repatriation

True's Trial as an Offensive against Cultural Invasions, or the Language of War

It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted.

-- By JesseCreed - 09 Feb 2008

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